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"There is a terrible desperation to the increasingly pathetic rationalizations from the climate denial camp. This comes as no surprise if you take the long view; every single undone paradigm in history has died kicking and screaming, and our current petroleum paradigm 🐉🦕🦖 is no different. The trick here is trying to figure out how we all make it to the new ⚡ paradigm without dying ☠️ right along with the old one, kicking, screaming or otherwise." - William Rivers Pitt

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Posted by: AGelbert

Agelbert NOTE: Eddie is a closte racist that pretends to be objective. He loves to post propaganda while claiming he "isn't racist or right wing". He is BOTH. He is a also a very clever LIAR. Peoplel ike Eddie are stalking horses for Fascism and the worst aspects of human greed and racism while presenting themselves as "objective, caring" individuals. Learn to spot their BULLSHIT.

I ran across this excellent piece in the Washington Post. It isn't new, but it's timely.It helped me understand how a moron like Trump can come to be President, and be hugely popular among large numbers of people, even though almost everything he does is either ignorant, stupid, or downright mean.

The Post goes to great lengths to make sure people like me have trouble reading them for free or re-posting their stuff on forums, so it would be much easier to read the images, which are huge, if you just follow this link.

The white working class has received enormous attention since Election Day thanks to its critical role in electing Donald Trump the next president. Exit polls show he won this group — defined as white adults over 25 without a four-year degree — by an overwhelming margin of 39 percentage points.

Census data show that 42 percent of American are part of the white working class, bigger than any other single group.

Yet although this demographic acted with surprising uniformity on Election Day — few other groups swung so far toward a particular party's direction since 2012 — it is far from monolithic. And it is certainly doesn't match the stereotype of the rural, blue-collar worker that has often been cited as a typical member of the white working class.

Here are seven key facts about this group that capture how socioeconomically diverse it actually is.

1. The majority of white Americans are working-class, and nearly half have more than a high-school education

The 90 million white adults without a college degree far exceeds the 51 million white adults who have at least a bachelor's degree. Of those without a college degree—the white working class—about 39 million, or 43 percent, have some college or an associate's degree. Another 41 million have only a high-school diploma, and the remaining 9 million do not have a diploma.

White workers without a degree earn more than workers of other races and ethnicities with similar levels of education, according to the bureau.

For instance, the median white worker with only a high-school diploma makes $706 in an ordinary week (compared to a worker with a bachelor's degree, who earns $1,154 a week). Among Latinos, the median worker with only a high-school diploma makes $611 — the same as the median Asian worker in this category. For black workers with only a high-school education, the figure is $578.

A significant number of people in the white working class are either unemployed or not looking for work. Among men between the ages of 25 and 54 — prime working age — only about 79 percent are working; another 5 percent are unemployed, and 16 percent are not working or looking for a job, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

In contrast, 93 percent of white men with a four-year college degree are working. The pattern is similar for women.

2. They live in cities and suburbs, not primarily in rural America

While it is true that the white working class outnumbers white graduates in rural America — and the election did highlight a huge urban-versus-rural divide — many of them also live in and around cities.

A Post analysis of Census data shows that there are 62 million working-class white adults living in the metropolitan footprint of a large city with a population of over 250,000. There are just 37 million white adults with bachelor's degrees living in these metropolitan areas.

Many working-class whites might live in outlying counties, but their neighborhoods are still intimately connected with the economic and social life of the nearby city. Metropolitan areas are defined as regions in which at least a quarter of a county's population commutes to the city or elsewhere in the metropolitan area for work.

3. Few of them have blue-collar jobs

Trump campaigned on promises to restore employment in factories and the manufacturing sector through aggressive negotiation on international trade. Yet not that many members of the white working class work traditional manufacturing jobs. Most of them are employed in white-collar or service occupations, according to the Brookings Institution.

According to a Post analysis of Census data, white workers with less than a four-year degree most commonly hold jobs as store managers, cashiers, salespeople and administrative assistants. Many work in food service as servers or cooks. Some are nurses. There are a number of blue-collar workers in trades outside of manufacturing, such as trucking and construction.

White workers who do have bachelor's degrees are more likely to be teachers, accountants and lawyers.

4. A few use opioids, but far more use marijuana

A study published last year by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton focused national attention on opioid abuse among the white working class. The study showed that the number of white Americans with no more than a high-school diploma dying from poisonings, including drug overdoses, increased five-fold from 1999 to 2013.

These numbers are troubling, but opioid use remains relatively rare among the white working class despite the increase.

Only about 2 percent of white respondents between the ages of 25 and 54 without a bachelor's degree use heroin or prescription painkillers not for medical purposes, according to a Post analysis of a Department of Health and Human Services survey. About half as many whites with a degree used these drugs.

Marijuana is more popular, especially among the white working class. About 11 percent of respondents without a bachelor's degree reported getting high at least once in the past month. The figure was 7 percent among white respondents with a degree.

Alcoholism is also a greater danger among the white working class. Those with no more than a high-school diploma are nearly six times more likely to die of chronic cirrhosis of the liver than those with at least a bachelor's degree, Case and Deaton report.

Again, however, these figures might be more representative of the few who seriously abuse alcohol than of the white-working class as a whole. The Post's analysis also shows that those both with and without a bachelor's degree report drinking about nine or 10 days out of the month. Respondents without a bachelor's degree are somewhat more likely to binge on booze, but the difference is small in the context of the overall population.

5. They are not culturally conservative

While Donald Trump's marital history and crude language were prominent features of the campaign, the white working class doesn't tend to be especially sensitive to these cultural issues as much as traditional conservatives are. On the whole, the white working class attends church about as frequently as the general population, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.

Over the last few decades, members of the white working class have also become less likely to be married. As this chart from economists Shelly Lundberg and Robert A. Pollak shows, marriage rates have fallen for whites without a college degree. About 55 percent of white men and 60 percent of women with no more than a high school diploma are married, compared to about 70 percent of men and women with four-year college degrees.

6. Being white matters to many of them

Members of the white working class identify more strongly with their race. About 40 percent of the white working class said that being white was "very" or "extremely" important to their identity, compared to about 29 percent of whites with four-year college degrees, according to a Post analysis of a January poll from the American National Election Studies project.

The two groups are equally patriotic, however. The same poll showed that, regardless of their educational background, about 70 percent of whites say that being American is "very" or "extremely" important to their identity.

7. They don't believe education will make them better off

Even though data shows that whites without a bachelor's degree earn less, on average, than their more-educated counterparts, many members of the white working class are not hopeful about the power of education to improve their lives.

About 51 percent say that their lives would be no different if they had a four-year college degree, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation/CNN poll. Only 45 percent believed that a bachelor's degree would benefit them. In contrast, 73 percent of the black working class and 74 percent of Hispanic working class said they thought having a four-year college degree would make their lives better.

Overall, members of the white working class say that they're doing okay. When asked if they felt "happy" about their lives, about 79 percent said yes, compared to 87 percent of college-educated whites. There's a happiness gap there, but the majority of the working class — no matter their race or ethnicity — are staying on the sunny side.

Sort of an artificial demographic, doesn't mean much. So artificial it is contrived. Perhaps it is meant to awaken a sleeping giant, a collective consciousness which screams "IF YOU'RE WHITE, YOU'RE ALL RIGHT! ANY OTHER HUE, I DON'T TRUST YOU.

What seems warm an fuzzy with fancy picture and graphs which size themselves to the WAPO column width, fuzzy and full of fun tasty facts that white people love, I'm one of them, I got my fix, may be a very sophisticated chunk of propaganda. It's us against the rest of the world. Our masters want us defined as a glass teat watching 'us' while they play nuclear ping pong to get every last drop of oil they can. To do that they want everybody hating brown people, not with actual racism but with something very close to it. Brown people defined as the rest of the world regardless of color.

Sit back and enjoy the show.

True. I might add that Trump is not now, or ever has been, popular with the anything but a SMALL minority of Americans. The unending mendacity about Trump as a "successful business man" (yeah, as long as he had a salary of $200,000 a year from the time he was 4 years old) and how "clever" he has been to file bankruptcy all those times (stiffing creditors is SO "successful" ) in addition to the "brown ain't good" vile propaganda you pointed out, constitutes a constant s h i t storm of mindfuck trying to manipulate people to vote against their economic interests.

EVERY ASS HOLE at the Fed and the banks and the Congress and the Senate and the White House and the Pentagon AND having a CEO position in the top profit over people and planet Corporations in the S&P 500 HAVE COLLEGE PLUS degrees. THESE EDUCATED ASSHOLES ARE F U C K I N G UP THE PLANET.

To claim that voting goes the way it does in the USA becasue of "education levels" ignores a rather BLATANT FASCIST, RACIST ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM (quite deliberately, I might add) called RIGHT WING ELECTION RIGGING. If elections were not RIGGED to SILENCE the vote of WE-THE-PEOPLE, most who DO NOT have COLLEGE DEGREES, this country would not be in the RIGHT WING FASCIST MESS it is in now.

The midterm election proved that voter suppression is alive and well. Here's a quick overview of what voters encountered in key states where LDF staff and volunteers were on the ground as part of our Prepared to Vote initiative:

Georgia—Voter Registrations Blocked: Before the election, the state attempted to block 53,000 voter registration applications, most of which were from African Americans. On Election Day, voters encountered long lines and malfunctioning voting machines. Some polling places were even changed without notice. Now, over a week after the election, votes for Georgia's next governor are still being recounted.

Alabama—Black Students Denied the Vote: LDF filed a complaint on behalf of four Black college students who were denied the right to vote in Madison County. Across the state, voters encountered barriers to the ballot because of “inactive voter” lists, inaccurate voter registration lists, mismatches between addresses on photo ID and registered addresses, and poorly trained poll workers.

South Carolina—Machines Changing Votes:In Richland County, voters reported that machines were changing their votes. There was only one technician assigned to recalibrate malfunctioning machines for every five polling places, resulting in long wait times during the morning hours.

Texas—Early Voting Cut for Students: Last month, LDF filed a lawsuit on behalf of students at Prairie A&M University who are being disenfranchised by attempts to curtail early voting on campus. On Election Day, Texas voters encountered challenges with malfunctioning or broken machines, polling place changes, and long wait times for public transportation for voters with disabilities.

Barriers to the ballot in these states and others revealed renewed efforts to restrict voters' rights. Our report on the obstacles we encountered underscores the ongoing impact of voter suppression on racial minorities and the need for greater protections and election reform.

LDF has fought diligently over the past year to defend civil rights, and we will continue to ensure that all voters can exercise their fundamental right to vote. Watch this video to learn more and help us keep fighting with a donation in support of equality.

A brief snapshot of a few of the voting issues the LDF team observed on the ground and learned about on Election Day

SNIPPET:

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TEXAS

In Tarrant and Dallas counties, Texas voters encountered challenges with malfunctioning or broken machines, polling place changes, and long wait times for public transportation for voters with disabilities.

At the Lakeside Recreation Center precinct, voters—most of whom were people of color—were turned away for attempting to vote at the wrong location. The precinct lines changed 😈 from the previous election, but the voters did not receive notice.

In Harris County, long delays in the morning hours at polling sites around the county resulted in a judicial order toextend polling place evening hours at nine locations

READ MORE about ELECTION RIGGING in Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina AND Missouri:

ANOTHER Agelbert NOTE: It is no coincidence that the very same racist PIGS who rig elections in the USA are in total alignment with the Hydrocarbon Hellspawn destroying our environment for profit over planet. They are ALL "Birds" of the VERY SAME empathy deficit disordered, hate filled, vile, despicable, rampant greed driven "feather".

Alan Watts saw all this coming and warned us about it way back in 1970.

This election is not really over, especially in places like Georgia and Florida. And given the history of this nation that’s not surprising Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor, is facing off with Republican Brian Kemp, who is- or was, until the other day- Secretary of State in the state of Georgia. Part of the responsibility of that office is to oversee voter registration and elections. Kemp, whose ads while running against Abrams show him wielding a shotgun next to his pickup truck, has a political history, penchant, and strategy of voter suppression. He purged more than 1.5 million- that’s 10.6 percent of all registered voters- between 2016 and 2018. He carries on the grand old tradition in Georgia that dates back from the end of the Civil War to ensure that black people do not get to vote. As an example, Kemp put on hold the voter registration of 53,000 people, 70 percent of them African Americans.

The race between Abrams and Kemp is razor thin. If he falls below 50.1 percent of the vote, there has to be a special election. Kemp declared victory and is trying to get Abrams to concede, saying there’s a liberal conspiracy to deny him victory. And in Florida, the home of the hanging chad, made famous in the 2000 Gore v. Bush battle for the U.S. presidency, a recount has been ordered in both the race for the United States Senate between Governor Rick Scott and sitting Senator Bill Nelson, and in the race for governor between Congressman Ron DeSantis and Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum. The courts ordered the recount of eight million ballots by this Thursday. The larger metropolitan areas and communities like Broward County say they cannot possibly make that deadline of Thursday for the recount. It’s impossible; too many people. However, if they don’t, then all those votes- the majority of which might go to Andrew Gillum- for one, may not be counted at all.

And to top it all off, Trump has weighed in, saying and tweeting, quote, the Florida election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, because large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere- which, by the way, is a bald-faced lie. And then went on to tweet and say many ballots are missing or forged; another lie. And it goes on to say, tweet, an honest vote count is no longer possible. Ballots massively infected; must go on with election night results.

So the battle is on between the legacy of the Confederacy, slavery, and violence, and the forces of a new progressive South which could possibly be on the verge of electing the first black governors since Reconstruction, and the first black woman governor in the history of this country; and all this is coming now as no surprise.

Gerald Horne holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston; a frequent guest and contributor here on The Real News. And Gerald, welcome. Good to have you with us.

GERALD HORNE: Thank you for inviting me.

MARC STEINER: So, Gerald, let’s just take this from the top, here. The state of Georgia and Florida, and these recounts that are taking place at the moment. Now, what we’re seeing here- I want to start with this. I mean, how deeply do we understand how voter suppression, especially in Georgia, may have played in what’s going on between Kemp and Abrams at this moment?

GERALD HORNE: Well, the Abrams camp- quite correctly, in my opinion- has charged that Brian Kemp, who up until a few days ago was secretary of state of Georgia, and thereby, therefore helping to supervise and administer these elections, was involved in a rather crass and blatant attempt to purge from the voter roles particularly those who were considered to be African American, which would thereby tip the scales in his favor.

As we speak, the struggle consists of this: Stacey Abrams is trying to make sure that if Brian Kemp wins, he wins 50 percent-plus, as opposed to, as it now stands, where he may be below 50 percent. And if that is the case, that he is below 50 percent, that means that there should be a runoff. That is what is at stake as we speak.

Florida is a different kettle of fish. As of now, Rick Scott, the governor, and who you could see as being the agent in charge of these elections as governor, is now in a battle for the U.S. Senate with the 75-year old incumbent Bill Nelson. He has a 0.15 margin of victory as we speak, which automatically means that there will be a recount of some sort. It is apparent, as a judge has suggested, that the Republicans are trying to intimidate the recount process, going after local officials, particularly in Broward County. This campaign has been joined by Senator Marco Rubio, and also by the 45th president of the United States of America, who as you know has a second home in Florida, is very close to the man who is running for governor, and also has a slight lead, that is subject to a runoff- I’m speaking of Ron DeSantis. And according to press reports, Mr. Trump will consider it to be a personal affront and a personal rebuke if Ron DeSantis, in particular, is not dragged across the finish line.

MARC STEINER: I’m going to go- think of the race had happened 2000, when Al Gore, for most people’s consideration, won that race in Florida, but clearly didn’t fight it in the Supreme Court. If, for argument’s sake, Abrams and Gillum lose-and Nelson- lose in these recounts, and they take it to the courts, we have a very different situation in the courts than we did in 2000 in 2018. The courts have shifted right in America. The Supreme Court has shifted right and very conservative in America. If it goes that far, I mean, I’m wondering what you think politically it could set up.

GERALD HORNE: Well, you are correct to suggest that Mr. Trump has appointed a number of Supreme Court justices; Mr. Kavanaugh most recently. He’s appointed a record number of federal district court judges and federal appellate judges. That is true. However, I do feel that Ms. Abrams has attained some victories in the courts, and we should not rule out the possibility that she can attain further victories.

I agree with your supposition that Al Gore did the Democratic party no favors when he failed to challenge aggressively the recount in Florida in the year 2000 that led to George W. Bush being president. And I would say the same thing for John Kerry in 2004, where he could have challenged the result aggressively in the state of Ohio. We are now paying a very stiff penalty and price for their lack of aggressiveness.

MARC STEINER: To Florida for a moment, as we work our back up to Georgia. One of the things that I have been reading this morning in the papers is that Broward County, other counties that probably would lean for Gillum and lean for Nelson, most likely, are saying we need more time. We have too many voters here. We have too many ballots to count. It cannot be done by Thursday. So it’s clear that they’re being set up for failure, it seems to me, and being set up to ensure a Republican win.

GERALD HORNE: I do not disagree with what you say. Not only that, but consider what happened on election day approximately a week ago. If you went to voting precincts and voting sites in the center of Georgia, for example the area around Morehouse College, Spelman College, the historically black campuses, you would have found long lines, you would have found voting machines that did not work precisely, not to mention not perfectly. However, if you had gone to some of the more conservative areas in the state of Georgia, such as Macon, or heading southward towards the Florida state line, you would not have encountered such a problem. Obviously that tips the scales in favor of the Republicans, just like the fact that the courts have been impacted by Mr. Trump also tips the scales in favor of Republicans.

MARC STEINER: Now, this race is very tight, and Kemp has been- Brian Kemp has been after Abrams and her work since the beginning with the new Georgia Voters Project that he took to court, tried to stop them from registering voters. He has banned people, one estimate is 1.5 million voters over a four year period; 35,000 more before this election started. And so I’m curious, I mean, this is- you know, Georgia has a history here. Georgia has a history of voter suppression, from the end of the Confederacy on. And it just seems to rear its head in whatever fashion or form it takes given the historical moment. So the battle in Georgia, to me, is indicative of a much larger battle that we’re facing. But it really is very intense in Georgia.

GERALD HORNE: I think you’re on to something. There’s a battle for small ‘d’ democracy. The battle was tipped in the favor of the right wing when a few years ago the U.S. Supreme Court, led by Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, the chief justice, ripped the heart out of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Fundamentally, as per the Voting Rights Act of 1965, until the Shelby decision that the Roberts Court helped to ram through, if a state like Georgia, which had a long-demonstrated record of racism and white supremacy in terms of keeping people away from the polls, if they made changes in terms of how many voting machines would be cited in a particular precinct, this had to be pre-cleared, so to speak, by the U.S. Justice Department. After the Roberts-engineered decision, preclearance went out of the window. And in its wake you saw a number of states move to have voter ID laws. For example, in the state of Texas, from where I’m speaking now, the legislature tried to have a voter ID law where a college ID was deemed not to be acceptable as a voter ID, but a hunting license was deemed to be acceptable, with the premise being that students might be prone to vote for the opponents of the Republicans, and hunters might be prone to vote for the Republicans.

This is the dire state of affairs that we’re encountering, not only in the state of Georgia, but I’m afraid to say all across Dixie.

GERALD HORNE: [Inaudible] said in the Atlantic, if the Georgia race had taken place in another country, say the Republic of Georgia, U.S. media and the U.S. State Department would not have hesitated to question its legitimacy. I mean, and even Jimmy Carter has said similar things, having monitored elections across the globe.

So no matter who ends up winning this in these cases right now in Georgia or Florida, let’s take Georgia again, what does it set up politically if Abrams wins? But what does it set up politically if Abrams is denied the win because of voter suppression? Because it interrupts a whole new political struggle that is also based on the reality that this Georgia race is so close. I mean, we’re talking about Georgia, where a black woman could win- can almost win, or win the governorship. So I’m curious what you think this sets up politically in terms of the struggle in this country.

GERALD HORNE: Well, an Abrams victory would be highly significant. I would even go so far as to say that the Abrams race to this point has been very significant. Recall that in recent elections in the state of Georgia the Democrats have sought to appeal to the mythical suburban swing voters. They have tipped to the right. They ran a relative of President Jimmy Carter; they ran a relative of former conservative Democratic hawk Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia. Both lost spectacularly.

And now you have Stacey Abrams, along with Andrew Gillum in Florida, who are running as true blue progressives. Andrew Gillum has even gone so far as to come out for Medicare for All. He campaigned alongside Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who endorsed him. So they basically helped to blazed a new trail for the Democratic Party in Dixie. So win or lose, it seems to me that the Democrats now have a recipe and a prescription for getting closer to the finish line than they have gotten to this point. Let us hope that they follow the logic of what I’m saying.

MARC STEINER: If you look at the history of this country and the power that the South has played politically in this country from the very founding of this nation, from three fifths of a vote so they can count the people who they had enslaved to ensure that they had political power, to what happened in the civil rights movement of the ’60s, to what this struggle is about now and the form it’s taking at this moment in the South, the fact that you have this progressive mass of people who are who are at least half the population in both states, if not a majority, this is a really different political dynamic for the future. It’s built also around the black struggle in the south via a Gillum and Abrams personifying it in their races. So I just want to take a step further, what this might say for the inside of the Democratic Party, what this says for the continuing struggle in America, for a progressive America, in the face of this kind of real right-wing nationalist pushback embodied in Trump, but actually started much earlier.

GERALD HORNE: Well there is also a message for the GOP, for the Republican Party. I’m not saying that demographics is destiny, but it’s apparent that the Trump recipe of ginning up a white right base, which he did successfully in November 2016, is basically reaching a point of expiration. That is one of the major messages that one can glean not only from the Abrams and Gillum races, but I would say from the results last Tuesday more generally.

I think that there’s a lesson for the progressive movement, as well. That is to say, that oftentimes our friends in the progressive movement have a rather dewy-eyed, overly idealized analysis of the history of this country. They tend to point to the Bill of Rights as being this great leap forward for humanity. Whereas if you look at the Bill of Rights with more careful scrutiny, you’ll find that it was devised without the black population in mind, or it was devised to target the black population, and I would also say the Native American population. That is the import of the ballyhooed Second Amendment, which basically authorized the use of militias to suppress revolts of the enslaved, and uprising by the indigenous population. Therefore I think that the races that we’re talking about in Florida and Texas not only have significance in import for the GOP and for the Democratic Party; it has significance and import as well. For those to the left of the Democratic Party.

MARC STEINER: So I don’t know whether you are or not; my guess is you may not be a betting man. But I’m curious what you think the outcome might be of all this in the next week.

GERALD HORNE: Well, it’s hard to say. If you look closely at the numbers, I think that there is a distinct possibility that a recount a count of absentee ballots and provisional ballots, can drive Brian Kemp’s numbers below 50 percent, causing a runoff which would then allow Stacey Abrams to do a major mobilization and win the gubernatorial race in the state of Georgia. Things in Florida seemingly are different, but I’m rather reluctant to make a prediction and stare into my crystal ball, because we all know about the hanky panky and shenanigans that the Republicans are notorious for in the state of Florida, and they can upset and destabilize the most accurate of prognosticators.

MARC STEINER: It is always a pleasure to have you with us here on The Real News. I really enjoy your thoughts and hearing what you had to say about all this. I appreciate your time.

GERALD HORNE: Thank you.

MARC STEINER: And I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. Clearly we’re going to stay on top of this one. Take care.

Posted by: AGelbert

After White Supremacist Terror, Trump Doubles Down from Birthright to the Border

October 30, 2018

In the aftermath of a spate of white supremacist violence from Florida to Kentucky to Pittsburgh, President Trump is ramping up nativism and xenophobia. The U.S. is deploying up to 14,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, purportedly in response to a caravan of Central American asylum seekers. Trump also says he might revoke birthright citizenship for the babies of non-citizens. We are joined by historian Gerald Horne of the University of Houston

From pipe bombs in the mail, to the killing of two black shoppers in Kentucky, to the synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, the U.S. is grappling with yet a new round of white supremacist terror. But in the aftermath of this incident, and just days before the midterms, President Trump is ramping up the nativism and xenophobia that has stoked white supremacists. First, on Monday, federal officials announced plans to send 5,200 active duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in response to a caravan of Central American asylum seekers fleeing violence in dire conditions at home.

SPEAKER: Our message to the organizers and participants of this caravan is simple: As the President and Secretary Nielsen have made clear, we will not allow a large group to enter the United States in an unsafe and unlawful manner. For those that seek to cross the border illegally. We will apprehend them and fully enforce the laws of the United States. For those that seek to make an asylum claim safely and lawfully in a port of entry, the governor of Mexico has already offered you protection and employment authorization. If you are fleeing alleged persecution at home, you have arrived at a safe place to make your claim.

AARON MATE: According to Newsweek, the size of the U.S. force on the border could top 14,000. This comes amid reports that Trump is mulling executive actions to shut down border entry entirely, and even suspend habeas corpus, which grants detainees the right to appear before a judge.

Then on Tuesday, Trump announced yet another potential executive action. Speaking to AXIOS, Trump said he might revoke birthright citizenship for babies of noncitizens and undocumented immigrants.

DONALD TRUMP: Now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order. Now, how ridiculous- we’re the only country in the world where a person comes in, has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.

That’s very interesting. I didn’t think anybody knew that but me. I thought I was the only one.

AARON MATE: Joining me to discuss Trump’s latest anti-immigrant actions is Gerald Horne, historian and professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Houston. Welcome, Dr. Horne. Let me ask you first about this latest announcement from Trump today about birthright citizenship. Do you think that he even has the constitutional authority to end birthright citizenship for noncitizens? And if he doesn’t, then as a historian, what do you make of what he’s doing here?

GERALD HORNE: Apparently he does not have the authority to end birthright citizenship via an executive order. That is the impression I got from the words not only of Speaker Paul Ryan, but also from a survey of a number of leading constitutional scholars.

Having said that, we all know that the Republicans have packed the courts, the federal courts, in recent months and years. And many of these federal judges owe a debt of gratitude to the Republicans and Mr. Trump personally for him placing them on the court. And so it’s possible that there could be a wildcard federal judge, and certainly a wildcard Supreme Court, that could pass on that. I doubt it. But we’re in a different age right now. It’s obvious that many of our liberal friends have miscalculated when they overestimated the democratic potential nature of the United States of America, and the Bill of Rights, particularly. And I’m afraid to say that many of us are going to pay the price for that miscalculation.

AARON MATE: As a historian, when you hear Trump speak like this, what historical parallels come up for you? I’ll just say for myself that my thought today was I was recalling how the Nazis, back when they were formulating their own so-called racial purification laws, that they looked to the United States for inspiration.

GERALD HORNE: That’s true. There’s been a good deal of scholarship with regard to that, particularly how the Nazis looked the United States for so-called antimiscegenation laws. That is to say, laws in the United States that basically made it verboten for those defined as white to marry those defined as black. Obviously in Germany that was transferred to the German non-Jewish population and the Jewish population.

That is one striking parallel, but of course there are striking parallels from U.S. history itself. We should not forget the fact that when the Ku Klux Klan arose post-1865 in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, in many ways they were the armed wing of the Democratic Party. That is to say, the Democratic Party then being the party of Jim Crow, the party of Dixie. And that kind of terrorism that was inflicted, not least on black people post-1865, we hear echoes at least of that kind of policy in 2018 as enunciated by the present occupant of the White House.

AARON MATE: OK. So you mentioned 1865. So just 13 years later, in 1878, you have the signing of the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars military forces from playing a role in domestic law enforcement. Now there is talk of that being suspended, along with the suspension of habeas corpus, as I mentioned earlier, giving people the right to appear before a judge in this crackdown on the border, with Trump sending thousands of troops there, possibly over 14,000, which is about as many as are in Afghanistan right now.

And yesterday at the White House, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked about this, and whether these drastic steps, these suspensions of constitutional protections, is on the table.

REPORTER: Now those are options on the table?

SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS: Look, I’m not going to get into specific policies that we’re considering. There’s a number of actions that we’re looking at taking. When we’re ready to make an announcement on that front, we’ll let you know.

AARON MATE: That’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders. So Dr. Horne, if Trump is sending thousands of troops to the border, is he violating Posse Comitatus? And would there be a historical parallel for such an infringement, as he’s apparently doing that?

GERALD HORNE: Well, once again I’d have to give a similar response as I gave to the previous question; that is to say, that there is an argument that he is in violation of the law, but there is a counter argument that if he goes before the so-called right judge, that will not matter. It reminds me of what Trump’s lawyer Roy Cohn, the late Roy Cohn, the anticommunist fixer and colleague of Senator Joe McCarthy, once said. When he went into court he didn’t want to know what the law is, he wanted to know who the judge is. And I think that that’s the kind of philosophy that you see taking place with regard to Mr. Trump’s actions.

Secondly, this removal or threat to remove habeas corpus is particularly dangerous. That is a long-standing writ that goes back to England hundreds of years ago which allows a prisoner improperly detained to go before a judge and be released. That suggests that there will be a mass roundup of some sort where people will not be able to go to a federal judge to be released.

And then thirdly, I think you have to look at the fact or the possibility that what Mr. Trump is saying is a desperate electoral gambit. That is to say, the midterm elections are taking place on Tuesday. There are polls that suggest that the Republicans will lose the House. More to the point, the Houston papers in particular are talking about a Beto bump; that is to say, senatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke, who’s running against incumbent Ted Cruz. He’s behind in the polls. But the so-called Beto bump might wipe out Republican Congressman Will Hurd, a former CIA analyst who is now in the Congress. He’s running against a very strong Democratic candidate who is expected to benefit from the Beto bump. And it’s possible that Mr. Trump is trying to prevent other Beto bumps by ginning up the right-wing base, particularly in southern Texas.

AARON MATE: So in terms of these threats to all these basic rights, now, there is a growing fear that this is not just being done to target undocumented people, but this is also part of a process that wants to gin up fear in order to justify cracking down on dissent on progressives at home, working people, to crush strikes. And I’m wondering, in this context, to what extent is the historical crackdown on working people, the crushing of unions- a huge theme especially in the 20th century- how has that contributed to what we’re seeing today, and actually to the appeal and the power of white supremacy across the country?

GERALD HORNE: Well, I couldn’t have asked a better question myself. One of the things I’ve been stressing in recent days, months, and indeed, years, is that you cannot underestimate the potency of the Red Scare, which not least routed progressive labor. I oftentimes cite the case of Harry Bridges, the leader of West Coast Longshore, who led the San Francisco General Strike of 1934. Happened to be born in Melbourne, Australia. And therefore it led to repeated efforts not only to deport him, but to weaken his progressive leadership. The Union, the International Longshore and Warehouseman’s Union, had to spent a pretty penny out of its treasury in order to keep their leader from being deported. I could also cite the case of Ferdinand Smith, a black Jamaican who was number two in the National Maritime Union, who actually was deported in the early 1950s, which led to the demolishing, virtually, of the National Maritime Union, which he led, turning ships into floating slums.

That also led to a devastation of political education which has been particularly harmful to the working class. Particularly, I would say, those working-class voters who were seduced and [traduced] into voting for Mr. Trump in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, et cetera. And it created an overall atmosphere of backwardness whereby the class question was downgraded, which inevitably lead like a seesaw to the rising of ultra right-wing white nationalism, which you just saw manifested in Pittsburgh, not least.

AARON MATE: I want to go to a clip of some of the xenophobia and chauvinism that has stoked by the media. Because it’s not just Trump, it’s also his allies on Fox News, especially. So I want to go to Lou Dobbs speaking recently on his show on the Fox Business Network.

LOU DOBBS: The fear is, to be clear, the fear is that some of them are radical Islamist terrorists that have intermingled with this group of Central Americans. A further fear is that many of the, you know, so many of these, these migrants from Central America, frankly, are radical left-wingers. Their leaders are left-wing party members, for crying out loud, out of Honduras. This is- and no one other than the President at this point, we- you know, I keep expecting to hear Chuck Schumer Nancy Pelosi express their concern for America. But with a caravan that seems to be doubling every few days in size, they have said nothing.

AARON MATE: So that’s Lou Dobbs speaking on the Fox Business Channel about the migrant caravan comprised of hundreds of people fleeing violence and persecution in Central America. Dr. Horne, As we wrap, where do you rate this moment right now in history, in terms of the level of white supremacy and chauvinism we’re seeing being mainstreamed across the country? And if you have any comments on what Lou Dobbs said there, and especially about the role that that’s stoking fear of immigrants has played in a historical context.

GERALD HORNE: Well, obviously Lou Dobbs is introducing a canard when he’s speaking about so-called Middle Easterners who are part of this caravan of hope, which is making its way through Mexico as we speak. I find it also striking that the speaker in waiting, Kevin McCarthy, has demonized Jewish billionaires such as George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, who’s leading the struggle to impeach Mr. Trump; and deleted his tweet demonizing them, but the stain still remains. Note as well that the New York Times just reported this morning that a leading executive of Campbell’s Soup Company was recently ousted because he singled out George Soros as financing this caravan that’s heading North. That is to say, like Kevin McCarthy, helping to whip up the kind of anti-Semitism that you saw recently manifested in Pittsburgh.

I would say this is a particularly dangerous moment, because unlike previous dangerous moments we don’t have the necessary kind of international solidarity that the black liberation movement, for example, enjoyed for decades, but does not necessarily enjoy today. That means that the ultra right-wing white nationalists have wind in their sails as a result, and our climb as a result will be uphill, I’m afraid.

AARON MATE: We’ll leave it there. Gerald Horne, historian, professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Houston, thanks very much.

Posted by: AGelbert

🦍 👹 😈 Does anyone actually believe the allegations against Kavanaugh? Isn't it a little fishy that all of a sudden every Republican politician is under fire for things that no one can prove?

MG Berge 👍👍👍, Consultant

Answered Friday, September 28, 2018

Yesterday was a watershed moment for me as a Fat old privileged white man. My suggestion is that you listen carefully and digest before reveling in your partisan thoughts.

First off, I do believe the allegations against Kavanaugh, in part due to Ford’s testimony, in part due to his, but even more so due to my personal realizations. His anger and tears were the emotions of a man caught in a lie. Have patience with me as I tell you a relevant story. It was just over 18 years ago that I met my lovely wife. During our short courtship period, she revealed her traumatic story to me. As a single young mother, several years before we met, she was assaulted in much the same manner as Ford claims. Having just started a new job one month prior, she was encouraged to attend a dinner with a good many co-workers as well as very senior executives in the conference room at a local hotel/convention center. People were laughing and showing off pictures of their families. It seemed to be a good team building moment. At the end of the two-hour event, she has a foggy recollection of being carried upstairs by two of the senior execs, unable to move. Now if you assume she had consumed too much, you would be wrong as she was a competitive bodybuilder/fitness athlete. She did not drink and was obsessive about her diet. Something was put into her water.

Those two senior execs, that had spent a great deal of time showing her pictures of their families and winning her trust, R A P E D HER. She recalls it very clearly. Having two kids to feed, she was worried about her job and struggled to go to work the next day, but she went. Noticing she was distraught, two female co-workers asked and she relayed the incident, whereby she was encouraged to go to the hospital. She did so only after finishing the day's work as she was afraid of losing her job. The police came, she was photographed (there were many marks) and in the end, she did not press charges. WHY? Again, she was afraid of losing her job and she knew that she would be condemned, not the senior execs. There were kids to feed.

I was certainly compassionate when I heard the story, but it just did not really register on me. Then we have yesterday. I had the TV on to the news (mostly for noise) while I worked in my home office. I had not one inkling that this hearing should have an effect on my wife. Oh, but did it have an effect. Ms. Ford’s testimony had my wife transfixed, it brought everything back for her as if the event in question was yesterday. How in the sam hell could I be so blind, so inconsiderate and stupid?

The answer to the how is that I am one of the guilty, that being a privileged old white man. No, I have never assaulted or raped anyone, far from it, but I certainly have been callous to women's rights. I laughed at the life-sized Wile E Coyote doll in the trophy case of the team house. One arm cut off and a name tape across the chest and a spare silly looking hat on its head. It was a trophy that some worked hard to win, though I will let you all imagine how. I have told jokes at women's expense and unconsciously looked at women in the workplace as playing only a supporting role. I have bought into the sexual objectification of women as promoted by TV/print advertising as well as Hollywood and the conservative culture I grew up in. I was taught that us men were proper and conservative when in reality we were selfish p r i c k s.

Last night I realized my gross stupidity but it took the suffering of my wife watching this entire sordid affair to do so. I feel horrible.

The whole confirmation/Republican/Democrat thing is nothing but bullshit. I was sickened by both Republicans and Democrats yesterday as both used Dr. Ford as nothing but an expendable tool in order to get their way. I often think we have fallen so far, but then again, maybe we have never climbed out of the stinking hole filled with s h i t that we have always been in.

My concept is “when in doubt, throw it out”. 👍 This is a job interview and the Judge is owed nothing. The response should be “Thank you Mr. Kavanaugh, you are impressive but we need to look elsewhere”. There is no shortage of candidates that have no baggage. I am happy that all of this is coming out, painful though it may be. Change is needed and the privileged white guy needs to be taken down a notch or 50.

It is time we start acting like dignified people pulling in a unified direction. This selfishness and tribal mentality will quickly destroy a great nation. We can be better than this!!!!!!!

Edit:

While I am trying to keep up with comments and clarify where I can, it is getting a bit out of my hands, so I thought I would add a couple points here. In regards to women's, rights, I am heartened to see the groundswell of activity and attitude that has occurred over the last several years. Writing the words “women's rights” seems odd to me as those rights should be expected, taken for granted. But they have not been and we are now seeing the results. I say it is about time.

As to Judge Kavanaugh, I have said enough about him already. There are enough words floating around out there professing his guilt or innocence, how this is right or wrong so that I do not need to add any more insight. What I see this being about is full disclosure. Not by Kavanaugh but by all women. There has been so much abuse specifically because us men have not been held accountable. Understandably. most women HAVE BEEN afraid to come forward after an assault.

Even today, my wife does not want anyone to know about her assault. In fact, I am feeling bad about this written story right now and it may have to come down. She is afraid of how it could affect her in the workplace, how it could affect the opinions of friends and family. Embarrassed, ashamed, scared or maybe just fearful of having to continually face the memories are all reasons for staying silent. Then we have the knowledge that for so long, the victim will be held to blame and the assaulter will face no repercussions.

Us men have gotten away with our poor behavior for so long, comfortable in the knowledge that no one will say anything, and if they do we can just deny it. This confirmation process is stoking the fires of anger in many, many women. They are sharing their story, opening the floodgates. Doing this by many will change the calculation. When aggressors realize it will be much harder to get away with poor behavior, there will be less poor behavior to try and get away with.

To be sure, there will be collateral damage, impacts to undeserving men, it is inevitable. Maybe that collateral damage will be to Kavanaugh, maybe to me. If so, that's fine as everything good in life comes at a cost.

Posted by: AGelbert

Hirono quoted an email in which Kavanaugh wrote, “I think the testimony needs to make clear that any program targeting Native Hawaiians as a group is subject to strict scrutiny and of questionable validity under the Constitution.”

That email was one of tens of thousands of documents the GOP-led Senate Judiciary Committee had marked “committee confidential” in an unprecedented attempt to hide them from the public. By releasing that email, Hirono risked censure, discipline or removal from the Senate.

Hirono, who said Kavanaugh’s views on Native Hawaiians are “factually wrong” and incredibly offensive, told the nominee:

Posted by: AGelbert

Today the city of Sugar Land is a sprawling suburb southwest of Houston, home to Imperial Sugar Co., shopping malls and endless cul-de-sacs. ... But, more than a century ago, it was a sprawling network of sugar cane plantations and prison camps. Sugar Land was better known then as the Hellhole on the Brazos. From sun up to sun down, convicts who were leased by the state to plantation owners toiled in the fields chopping sugar cane sometimes until they "dropped dead in their tracks," as the State Convention of Colored Men of Texas complained in 1883.

In modern-day Sugar Land it was all easy to forget - but not for one man named Reggie Moore, who couldn't stop thinking about it. ... Moore started researching Sugar Land's slavery and convict-leasing history after spending time working as a prison guard at one of Texas's oldest prisons, but his curiosity evolved into obsession. He had a hunch. Based on what he learned, he believed that the bodies of former slaves and black prisoners were still buried in Sugar Land's backyard. He focused his attention on a site called the Imperial State Prison Farm, the one that bore the name of the country's premier sugar company.

For 19 years he searched for their bodies, stopping just short of sticking a shovel in the dirt himself. ... "I felt like I had to be a voice for the voiceless," said Moore, who is African American. ... This week, his quest produced results. ... At the former Imperial State Prison Farm site, archaeologists have unearthed an entire plot of precise rectangular graves for 95 souls, each buried 2 to 5 feet beneath the soil in nearly disintegrated pinewood caskets. The 19th century cemetery was unmarked, with no vestige of its existence visible from the surface.

And it was almost "truly lost to history," archaeologist Reign Clark of Goshawk Environmental Consulting told The Washington Post. ... The graves were found, really, by accident. The local Fort Bend Independent School District began construction on a new school at the former prison site in October. Then in February, a backhoe operator happened to see something jutting out of the dirt. He thought it was a human bone. ....

Just about the best book I've read in the last few years was "Slavery by Another Name." It was written by Douglas Blackmon, who at the time was the Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal. He is now at the University of Virginia.

At the center of a massive new real-estate development in Atlanta, an $18 million monument designed to honor 2,000 years of human achievement is nearing completion. When it opens this summer, a museum inside the Millennium Gate also will pay special tribute to the accomplishments and philanthropy of some of the founding families of modern Atlanta. Organizers say plans for the exhibit don't include one overlooked aspect of two of the city's post-Civil War leaders: the extensive use of thousands of forced black laborers. The builders of the 73-foot archway say the museum is too small to convey every aspect of the city's founders and that it's appropriate to focus on the positive aspects of these men. In this adaptation from his new book, "Slavery by Another Name," Douglas A. Blackmon, Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, chronicles how companies owned by these two men used forced labor to help rebuild Atlanta -- a practice that was widespread through the South.

Millions of bricks used to make the sidewalks and streets of Atlanta's oldest neighborhoods -- many of them still in use today -- came from a factory owned by James W. English, the city's former mayor, and operated almost entirely with black forced laborers. Many had been convicted of frivolous or manufactured crimes and then leased by the city to Mr. English's company, Chattahoochee Brick Co.

Between the Emancipation Proclamation and the beginning of World War II, millions of African-Americans were compelled into or lived under the shadow of the South's new forms of coerced labor. Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands were arbitrarily detained, hit with high fines and charged with the costs of their arrests. With no means to pay such debts, prisoners were sold into coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroad construction crews and plantations. Others were simply seized by southern landowners and pressed into years of involuntary servitude.

At the turn of the 20th century, at least 3,464 African-American men and 130 women lived in forced labor camps in Georgia, according to a 1905 report by the federal Commissioner of Labor.

DOUGLAS BLACKMON Director of Public Programs, Executive Producer of American Forum

Douglas A. Blackmon is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II , and co-executive producer of the acclaimed PBS documentary of the same name. He is also executive producer and host of American Forum, a public affairs program produced by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and aired on more than 200 public television affiliates across the U.S.

His book, a searing examination of how the enslavement of African-Americans persisted deep into the 20th Century, was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The Slavery by Another Name documentary was broadcast in February 2012 and attracted an audience of 4.8 million viewers. Slavery by Another Name grew out of his 2001 article on slave labor in The Wall Street Journal. It revealed the use of forced labor by dozens of U.S. corporations and commercial interests in coal mines, timber camps, factories, and farms in cities and states across the South, beginning after the Civil War and continuing until the beginning of World War II.

Blackmon was the longtime chief of The Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau and the paper’s Senior National Correspondent, and was a contributing editor at the Washington Post. He has written about or directed coverage of some of the most pivotal stories in American life, including the election of President Barack Obama, the rise of the tea party movement, and the BP oil spill. Overseeing coverage of 11 southeastern states for the Journal, he and his team of reporters were responsible for the Journal’s acclaimed coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the failed federal response after that disaster; the Journal’s investigation into the training and preparations of the 9/11 hijackers in Florida; immigration; poverty; politics; and daily reporting on more than 2,500 corporations based in the region.

As a writer and editor at large, Blackmon led the Journal’s coverage of the tea party and the final hours before the BP oil spill—for which he and a team of other Journal writers were finalists for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Those stories received a Gerald Loeb Award in June 2011.

Posted by: AGelbert

Agelbert NOTE: Scholar Judy Klass tells it like it is. My hat is off to her for this expert accurate analysis of the inexcusable actions by Trump 🦀 and his wrecking crew .

Quote

How do you think history will look at the Trump administration's policy of separating families at the border and putting children in what could be called concentration camps?Judy Klass , Truman Scholar, D.Phil Political Science/Latin American Studies, bookish wonk

Answered Jun 26, 2018

Hyperbole is dangerous. It’s true that even Godwin has said that thoughtful, well-informed people might compare Trump ‘s rhetoric with Hitler’s without looking ridiculous via Godwin’s Law — and after all, Trump’s rhetoric since he launched his campaign has been all about scapegoating the Other, and may well be modeled on the rhetoric that brought Hitler to power.

Donald Trump 'kept book of Adolf Hitler's speeches in his bedside cabinet and may have read it for inspiration'

But it’s tricky to talk about concentration camps. It bothers me when the internment camps in which Japanese Americans were held during World War II, as awful and unjust and un-American as they were, are called concentration camps — because for most people, concentration camp = death camp. It means Auschwitz. (Or “Holocaust Centers,” as Sean Spicer might say.) There are rotten, dehumanizing prisons for civilians in many places, but not many where huge numbers of people of all ages are gassed to death, their bodies then burned in crematoria. That was unusual. I’d only compare a few things to that: the Killing Fields of Pol Pot in Cambodia, what the Serbian Christians did to Bosnian Muslims at Srebenica over the course of a few days in the 1990s — the ugliest and most genocidal impulses that people have.

The internment camps that Japanese Americans were forced to live in may be a better analogy for the camps that the Trump administration now plans for parents and children who come here seeking asylum. (Those internment camps are the one thing that a lot of people condemn FDR for — and the only thing about FDR that Trump has talked about admiringly.) And there are crummy facilities for refugees all over the world.

The policy of separating children at the border that’s been in place for months — that’s kind of its own thing. Abusing refugee children to penalize their parents … I hadn’t quite heard of that one before. That’s something kind of distinctive and new that will be remembered about this administration. History will view it as being of a piece with numerous Trump era policies: framing various vulnerable minority groups as the dangerous “invading,” “infesting” Other; casually lying as smoothly as Hitler did and with the same gusto; appealing to people’s lizard brains and basest impulses; incompetent and incoherent policies that do as much harm accidentally as the few well-organized policies do intentionally … it’s of a piece with allowing 4,600 Americans to die in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and lying wildly about the numbers. It’s of a piece with mocking a Gold Star family because they are Muslim. It’s as ugly and incoherent and unjustifiable as the travel ban that the Supreme Court has now upheld. And so on.

Sessions and Trump and Nielsen and Huckabee Sanders — they can prevaricate and say oh, blame Democrats, blame the courts, this has been the policy all along, but it’s a policy John Kelly and Stephen Miller and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions came up with and put in place, and Miller and Sessions have acknowledged as much in the past. Under Obama, if a family turned themselves in at the border, the parent would be given a court date for the misdemeanor — and there was often someone they knew that they all could stay with until then, and most of the time they’d show up for their hearing, and if they were considered a flight risk, the parent could wear an ankle bracelet. That cost a little money, but not the thousands we’re now paying every day for each parent and child housed separately — and, soon, possibly housed together, indefinitely. It’s a waste of tax-payer dollars on an unnecessary policy because the system was working before and there were few crimes committed by those released on their own recognizance.

The Trump administration implemented this jarringly cruel policy of separating children from parents with no good system for keeping track of both, no long-term plan for how to reunite them, and now they have no clear plan for the changed policy they’ve announced … it’s wasteful, mean-spirited incompetence tinged with racism, all the way down the line.

That’s what history will remember about this policy and about this administration in general: no thought, no care, just the petulant, impulsive wrecking of long-standing policies and treaties that have been painstakingly assembled and were working well, casual violations of human rights, and cruelty for its own sake — again and again.

Posted by: AGelbert

Posted by: AGelbert

Militarizing US Schools and Society Only CreatesMore Gun Violence and Police Brutality

July 4, 2018

TRNN’s Ben Norton continues his discussion with Boston teacher Nino Brown, of the ANSWER Coalition, on the links between US militarism, gun violence, and police brutality. Nino Brown argues militarizing schools and more heavily arming cops will only make the problem worse

Posted by: AGelbert

Incarceration Nation: How US Political Prisoners Live in Hellish Conditions 😨

June 13, 2018

The US has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners. TRNN’s Ben Norton speaks with Nino Brown, of the Jericho Movement and ANSWER Coalition, who says American political prisoners are ignored, while they try to survive on dirty water

Story Transcript

BEN NORTON: It’s The Real News. I’m Ben Norton.

I’m here with the organizer Nino Brown. He organizes in the Boston area with a few different groups, including the ANSWER Coalition and Jericho. Jericho is a movement to free political prisoners in the U.S. And here we’re going to talk about the state of political prisoners in the United States. Frequently when we hear about political prisoners, media outlets talk about them as if they only exist in other countries, and as if the U.S., which has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners but 5 percent of the world’s population, we-, the impression is that we don’t have political prisoners. Of course, that’s not true. There are political prisoners from the Black Power movement who are still incarcerated after decades, from the Native American movement, and from other movements. So we’re going to talk today with Nino about some of the organizing around freeing political prisoners. Thanks for joining us, Nino.

NINO BROWN: Glad to be here.

BEN NORTON: So can you just talk about the state of political prisoners in the United States?

NINO BROWN: Well, currently I think, as you said, the United States has dozens of political prisoners that are, they’ve been incarcerated primarily because of their beliefs. They go against American capitalism, white supremacy, patriarcy, what have you. And they’re really soldiers from a past era movement. The Black Power movement, American Indian movement, Chicano movement, and so on and so forth. So today we have movements like Jericho that are trying to rekindle the general movement, consciousness around political prisoners, because we still have to deal with the fact that we have only 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated.

And those who are incarcerated from the past large social upheaval, we have just gems of knowledge, you know, important people to the movements and communities just rotting behind cages all because they chose to challenge American power, capitalism, racism, patriarchy, such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier. Most recently Red Fawn. She was an indigenous woman who was entrapped by the FBI during the Standing Rock movement. So we have not only political prisoners who are, you know, older, elders, but we have new political prisoners entering the United States prison system every year.

BEN NORTON: Yeah. And The Real News, in fact, we work with Eddie Conway. He frequently, you know, produces shows and hosts for us here at The Real News. He was himself an incarcerated political prisoner for decades. Can you also talk about some of, some of the recently released prisoners like Herman Bell, and others who are still incarcerated, specifically from the black liberation movement?

NINO BROWN: So, we still have-. Well, recently, Herman Bell came out and was being harangued around the conditions of his release. About two, three years ago Sekou Odinga came out, was released. But we still have Jalil Muntaqim, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and many others from the Black Power movements that are still incarcerated.

And there are others in the broader social movements that we don’t hear about, like the past, Weather Underground, like David Gilbert. However, the list of new political prisoners, that’s yet to be, not explicated, but just itemized, you know. So I consider folks who were involved in the anti-Trump protests, who are facing charges, some of whom are incarcerated, as political prisoners. I may not know all their names, but the conditions of why they were incarcerated is inherently political because they chose to take a stand against what they see to be a rising fascist government movement. So-.

BEN NORTON: This is a reference to the J20 protest on January 20 of last year, 2017. There were more than 200 protesters who were all just rounded up, kettled by cops, and all charged with a variety of charges. Some of, some of, some major felonies that could have led to decades in prison. Some of the prisoners have had their, some of the detainees have had their charges thrown out. But there are still dozens more, and the trials are ongoing, with almost no media coverage. I think what’s fascinating as a journalist is we have all these corporate media outlets that have rebranded in the age of Trump as part of the Resistance, as anti-Trump. The Washington Post has “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the top of its newspaper. But they have no interest in these activists who put their bodies on the line to protest Trump at the inauguration, and in some cases faced decades in prison.

NINO BROWN: Exactly right. So we’re trying to do with Jericho is really expand what do we mean by political prisoners, in addition to highlight the fact that the United States is not an exceptional nation, where it can point and wag its finger at other countries for having political prisoners, when they have prisoners right here in the United States. I know in Massachusetts we have several friends who are friends of Jericho who are facing repression inside prisons just for speaking up around their basic basic human rights and conditions of life.

BEN NORTON: Let’s talk more about this, because what’s interesting is there are two narratives, I think, that need to be debunked. One, that the U.S. doesn’t have political prisoners. But two, also that the conditions that these people are under are somehow humane. I mean, we’re talking about absolutely horrific, inhumane conditions that violate international law in every single way. Can you talk about some of the conditions that some of these prisoners in Massachusetts are forced to live under?

NINO BROWN: So an example that Jericho is really focusing on now is the prison in Norfolk. MCI Norfolk. So this is the same prison that Malcolm X went to when he was Detroit Red, a criminal, gangster, et cetera, and transformed his life, became Malcolm X. And fast forward to today. In 2011, all the state environmental agencies said that the water filtration system in Norfolk was defunct. And you know, the president said we’re going to fix it, we’re going to change it. 2017. Nothing has happened. The Boston Globe put out an exposé of what was going on in the prison after the prisoners began to agitate, organize around their own conditions, and expose the system, expose the prison system, for its inhumane treatment of them.

So what the prisoners are being subjected to is being, they’re drinking black-, are forced to drink and bathe in black and brown water, sometimes gray, that has high levels of [magnes], iron, and other harmful chemicals. [/b]All the while while these prisons are forced to labor, to work, otherwise they face the hole, solitary confinement. Another medieval form of torture, I would say. All the while they train these guard dogs, who are drinking clean, bottled water.

So here we have a clear example of just a gross violation of human rights where prisoners who are, you know, workers, a part of the working class, predominantly black or brown, agitating around their own conditions just to get clean water, and are being thrown into the hole, are being repressed. Some of our friends have written letters to them and had our letters intercepted.

BEN NORTON: That says everything. You-, it’s the symbol of that. You have human beings who are incarcerated, who can’t get clean water, but dogs, dogs that are being trained, get better quality water. Get water bottles. It just shows the priority.

NINO BROWN: Yeah, I mean, the United States doesn’t have, really, a priority over human life, period. Particularly when it comes to political prisoners, just because their, I think their existence and their fight pokes holes at the narrative of U.S. exceptionalism, or the fact that we have, or the idea that we have some sort of democratic system. I would say it’s more oligarchical. It’s more of an oligarchy with democratic trappings. But I think you’re exactly right. This is why we’re out here demanding that the prisons have clean, potable drinking water. Moreover, they have their visitation rights returned to them. There has been a shift to lower the number of visitors you can have and create more loopholes for prisoners to interact with their families, in addition to higher charges for calling in.

This is all on top of the fact that the prisons are outside of Boston, outside of the city. So not too many families have the resources to travel all the way to MCI Norfolk on a weekly basis just to engage in basic human interaction with their families.

BEN NORTON: Yeah, and let’s talk more about this. This is a huge racket. It doesn’t get much media coverage. You’re talking about how private corporations are profiting from providing, you know, food and other resources that should be provided but are not adequately provided to incarcerated people. So you know, you have companies that, where you can buy chips and other kinds of food, and they’re charging astronomical prices. We also have calls that are charged ridiculous rates per minute, and these incarcerated folks, their families and loved ones, have to raise large sums of money so that their incarcerated loved ones can try to get access to some food and some calls while corporations make a lot of money off of this.

NINO BROWN: Yeah. I mean, recently we tried to, we helped to start a campaign called the Deeper the Water campaign. One of our friends, Tim, he’s formerly incarcerated in MCI Norfolk. And once he got out, hit the ground running to organize to get clean water to his friends in prison in MCI Norfolk. So we organized a campaign to flood the canteen, to raise money so that the prisoners can buy the water in prison directly themselves. And you know, it seems a basic, you know, basic measure. However, once we started to do that, the prisoners who were buying the water inside with the money that we were able to send to them, they were being targeted for repression, you know, because the guards see a threat. And you know, when they see that people care about you on the outside, in that, you know, you still have some of your humanity left, and are still going to struggle, that’s a threat to them. It’s a threat to their profits, because they’ll be exposed in all sorts of lawsuits.

But I think exactly right, you hit the nail on the head in terms of how do they maintain the system. It’s a system of super exploitation and super profits. So you have the prisoners working for a dollar, two dollars, maybe, on top of being charged for purchasing things inside of the prison with their own money. And the recreational activities are not subsidized by the state, but they’re subsidized by the taxes that they levy off of these prisoners. So you have prisoners carrying the burden of their own incarceration financially, on top of families already being strained by this downward spiral of capitalism to provide resources to their loved ones in prison.

BEN NORTON: And then finally, I want to come to a conclusion here, but I want to take a step back and just talk about the prison-industrial complex in this country. And we both stress this, but again, the U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population, and 25 percent of incarcerated people on this planet. It’s just, just baffling to think of that parallel. And this is, this problem you’re talking about is not isolated to just Massachusetts. This is a problem everywhere, and it’s not just for incarcerated citizens. This is equally true for undocumented folks who are being forced into these facilities. They’re increasingly privatized.

So there’s a lot we can talk about, but I’m wondering if you can just wrap up here just reflecting on how the, how we should think about the American prison-industrial complex, American exceptionalism, and maybe you can even throw in, like, the war on drugs. Because many of these folks who are incarcerated, it’s not even necessarily for violent crimes. It’s for folks who were involved in trading drugs, or buying or using drugs. And we have this war on drugs that has led to a massive influx in this problem.

NINO BROWN: Yeah. I mean, I’ll start there with the, with the war on drugs. You know, it’s not a war on drugs. Drugs have continued to proliferate in our society to such a degree that we have, you know, such things as the opioid crisis. Drugs are still being used in prisons themselves, being used as weapons of war for these prison guards. So that whole veneer of a war on drugs is just that. An illusion. It’s really a war on, undeclared war, on black, indigenous, poor working class people, Chicano people, Latino people. And the way that they frame it as being around crime, it just distracts from the, from the focus, from the content of this being about social control. You know, that there was a counter-revolution following the radical ’60s and ’70s that saw, saw the need to suppress this radical, this radical uprising from the black population, from Latino populations, oppressed people generally. And prisons provide the perfect mechanism to maintain that social control in working class communities, but moreover to bolster capitalism, right.

So as we see globalization in the 1980s, and the really, the birth of neoliberalism, where production goes global, right, there’s this false notion that production has just disappeared. And it actually hasn’t. It’s shifted into prisons where prisoners are making anything from Nintendo 64 cartridges, to furniture, to things for Starbucks. You know, belt buckles. So it’s a way for them, for the capitalists 🦀 💵 🎩 😈 👹 to super exploit prison labor while at the same time maintaining social control and pacification over the oppressed communities, whether it be through recidivism, militarized policing in the communities that these incarcerated folks come from. It’s really just a way to control labor, but also to make super profits, all the while claiming to be fighting drugs, claim to be fighting crime, and so on and so forth.

BEN NORTON: We’re going to take a pause here for our conversation. I’m here with Nino Brown. Nino’s an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition and Jericho. In the second part we’re going to continue our discussion on the prison-industrial complex in the United States.

Posted by: AGelbert

While knowing nothing about the mechanics you are posting about, all my instincts tell me that the Amish are probably very well equipped to deal with the kind of Doom I expect, mainly a financial event that causes much hardship.

They will manage with empty supermarket shelves, no gas or rationed gas, no autos and Uber, as well as a dark boob tube and it's endless sporting events for the dim Colosseum crowd.

... You could split hairs that they can function in their way only because they are cocooned in a functional society that has the money to purchase from them but is rich enough to demand very little from them. ...

You took the words right out of my mouth. And no, I do not think that is simply spliting hairs. There is another group (pacifist German immigrants) in the USA that has the same priviliged existence. I don't remember the name of the group but they were always exempted from the military draft, along with the Amish and the Mennonites. The Mennonites are similar, but not exactly the same as the Amish.

Quote

The original difference in opinion came in 1693, when Jacob Ammann, a Swiss Anabaptist leader, felt that the church leaders were not holding to strict separation from the world and that spiritual renewal was needed. Ammann did not believe that the ban, or shunning, was being practiced as it should be. He separated from the Swiss Brethren segment of the Anabaptists over this issue and his followers were nicknamed “Amish.”

Ammann enforced more separatist ways upon his followers, and today some practices among the Amish include: untrimmed beards and hooks and eyes in place of buttons on outer garments of the men; horse and buggy transportation; horse-drawn implements for farming; plain and distinctive dress patterns; no electricity in homes.

However, most contemporary Mennonites are not outwardly that different from any person you meet on the street, and in fact live in countries around the world with a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds. Mennonites believe in simple living, but express that simplicity in a spirit of stewardship and awareness of the needs of others rather than completely separating from society as the Amish continue to do.

These religious communities also have another privilege that few Americans know about. They have a legal justification for not paying into Social Security. They are not required to have Social Security taxes withheld from their wages. Long ago, they established in Civil Court that, because their religion requires that all be cared for, no matter the age, and no matter whether employed or not, their society group does not require a government sponsored pension system. They are technically right, but the Social Security System has other functions that these pacifists should not be exempt from paying into.

To destroy the cohesion of any one of these communites, including the Amish, all you have to do is engage in corrupt US Government style eminent domain land grabs, as was done to the Native Americans long ago.

The Cherokees had an excellent, fully functional and independent community in Georgia, far exceeding anything the Amish, Mennonites or the other groups mentioned have ever accomplished, yet the government deliberately did not prosecute white poachers and criminals of all sorts that attacked them routinely. The "Trail of Tears" we all know about from the bastard Andrew Jackson was just the end of a LONG series of land grabs and other assorted clever attacks by Georgia whites.

The problem I have with these Amish good people, who I admire greatly, is that they will not go to bat for poor people outside their community or victims of racism either. The Amish (and the other groups mentioned) will not allow outsiders of color to become part of their communities.

Perhaps they are smart enough to know that this country would eliminate all their privileges in a hearbeat if they weren't 100% white. If that is so, then they are being realistic and practical, not religious or even worthy of praise for their "independent" life style.

Maybe God is protecting them, but I think it is their skin color that is protecting them, not God.

Posted by: AGelbert

“But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?” Du Bois asked. “Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”

“It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time,” he wrote. “No nation is less fitted for this role. For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred—making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike—rather a great religion, a world-war cry: Up white, down black; to your tents, O white folk, and world war with black and parti-colored mongrel beasts.”

Posted by: AGelbert

Alex Vitale talks about his new book “The End of Policing,” which casts a skeptical eye on the liberal calls for police reform, and calls for us to stop asking police to solve a wide variety of social problems

Posted by: AGelbert

Agelbert NOTE: This article should be required reading EVERY YEAR from the third grade on up to the senior year in high school. Students should be tested on this knowledge yearly as well.

NO student should be allowed to have a high scool degree unless they accept the scientific truth that race is a social construct with no purpose except to maliciously marginalize some for the express purpose of elevating others based on lies and fables.

Truthdig

MAY 20, 2018

The Royal Wedding and the End of Whiteness

By Juan Cole

SNIPPET 1:

Benjamin Franklin was extremely worried about whites being overwhelmed. He said in

“Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.”

So get this.Some of the eighteenth century founding fathers only thought English and Danish people were white. Even Swedes and Germans were “swarthy.” French certainly were. So Franklin would not have considered me white, since my family is French and German. We’re swarthy. We do have some Scottish, but if the Swedish are swarthy I suspect he thought the Scottish were, too. Since Coulter🐍 is in part Irish and German, Ben Franklin wouldn’t have accepted her as white, either, and was worried about the German part of her family acting like barbarians and interfering in elections. You can only imagine what he would have thought of German grifters like Donald Trump’s🦀grandfather 😈.

SNIPPET 2:

But “whiteness” is an illusion. Because the crowned heads of Europe intermarried over centuries and because Spanish nobility was in the mix, and because in turn Spaniards and other southwestern Europeans are up to 20% North African in heritage as well as having substantial genetic endowments from Jews and various other Muslim peoples, not to mention Phoenicians and sub-saharan Africans– actually all European royal families have been mixed-race for a very long time. In fact, some genealogists allege that Prince Harry is descended from the Prophet Muhammad the residual category of “white”. . . was used [in the early 20th century) by working class Catholics in a desperate bid to distinguish themselves from Latinos and African-Americans. But really. Why are Italian-Americans from Sicily “white” in America, but people from Latin America whose ancestors lived in Catalonia are “brown”? In the medieval era, for a while, both Catalonia and Sicily were in the same country, ruled by the crown of Aragon!

The popular press in America is confused about such issues because many writers do not realize that there is no such thing as race in the 19th century biological sense. You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 16 great-grandparents, and by the time you get back to 1400 you have a million ancestors. For someone who hails from Europe, how likely is it that none of them were Arabs and Berbers from southern Spain who had been forced to convert and then married Catholics?

Europe’s population in 1400 was only 78 million or so and [each modern is] descended from a million of them. And Arabs in southern Spain were in turn intermarried with Berbers and Africans. After 50 generations (a generation is 24 years), most of the world’s genes get shared around. Everyone in the Mediterranean basin shares common ancestors from only a few thousand years ago, including Tunisians and Egyptians and Spanish and Italians. The claim about Prince Harry and Muhammad is a little bit of a trick, since most contemporary Europeans are probably descended from Muhammad.

Posted by: AGelbert

Mervilus is 6 feet tall and broad-shouldered and has long, thick dreads. He was never in a gang. He was not a drug dealer. He had a job. He came from a good and loving family. But he was cursed with being black and poor and living in a city, Elizabeth, N.J., where if you are black and poor you are always one step away from being arbitrarily shot or arrested or tossed into jail. This is true in nearly every city in America.

There are cops in poor communities who hunt black boys and men as if they are prey. To them it is a sport. These cops are not always white, although they are often white. But they are always sadists. Intoxicated by the power to instill fear, use lethal force indiscriminately and destroy lives—and allowed to do so by a judicial system that no longer protects the most basic rights of the poor, including due process, adequate legal representation and the right to a jury trial—they circle around their victims like human vultures. If we were to use the strict dictionary definition, these police officers are criminals.

Posted by: AGelbert

Had the Waffle House shooting suspect been Muslim or black or both, we would likely have seen the word “terrorism” bandied about from the very start in both major media outlets and on President Trump’s Twitter feed. From Trump’s refusal to address the incident and considering how little speculation has occurred in the media questioning the motives of this white anti-government perpetrator in his targeting of black and brown folk, we can only conclude that there are racial double standards permeating our society, making necessary the assertion that Black Lives need to Matter.Reinking 👹 would have slaughtered many more people had he not been stopped by James Shaw Jr. 🕊, an African-American. Were Shaw an armed white man who used his gun to stop Reinking, there might have been no end to the political hay that Trump and the National Rifle Association would have made of the scenario. Instead, there has been a deafening silence from the outspoken president on Shaw, whose life-risking actions contradict the NRA’s favorite fantasy scenario of a “good guy with a gun.” But none of this should surprise us, as neither Trump nor the NRA have demonstrated any real respect for Black Lives.

The other Waffle House incident, which took place in the neighboring state of Alabama on the same day as the Antioch shooting, offered up yet more evidence of anti-black racism with the incredibly disturbing arrest of Chikesia Clemons by multiple male police officers 🦍🦍🦍🦍 late at night. 😠

Posted by: AGelbert

White Supremacy and Capitalism Are Deeply Entangled With the Colonial Slave Trade

Gerald Horne, Monthly Review Press: The United States may have declared its independence from Britain in 1776, but it was from England and other European powers that the breakaway colonies inherited an evil that was of fundamental significance to its future: slavery. This excerpt of The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism describes how the US is still experiencing that ruinous legacy today.

“Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions”

As a courtesy to AG, RE, and Eddie I am removing the posting you gents find so offensive.

Understand please from my point of view Eddie and company, I would rather look at and listen to a camel taking a good healthy **** at the local zoo than listening to and reading your hate filled disrespectful fallacious diatribes against our President and contempt towards our citizens who elected him.

May I please request you afford me the same consideration and STFU! Thanks GO

Posting removed by GO as a courtesy to certain fellow Diners.

Posted by: AGelbert

Golden Oxen,Your "history in photographs" is, to put it as charitably as I can, rather selective. If you had been objective, you would have shown pictures of Hoover smirking about MLK Jr.'s death. FBI Hoover had him assasinated. THAT is the correct perspective to the history you portray.

No, I do not expect you to respond respectfully. But I wish that, rather than hurl some sarcasm at me or lash out in your typical ad hominem fashion, you would accept this post as constructive criticism.

It really bothers me that you shot yourself in the foot, and probably your family's heart, by voting for an unrepentant enemy of the environment.

We all require a viable biosphere to survive in this valley of tears. I just do not get it, GO. You are smarter than that. Can you hate so much that you are willing to see everyhing you hold dear in this biosphere be increasingly insulted just so Trump remains in power? That does not make any sense at all.

Your Trump 🦍 hero (By the way,how does it feel to see Trump 🐵 depicted the SAME WAY 🦍 you often depicted Obama? My depiction is ACCURATE, unlike yours, because it applies to his polices, not his race.) makes Lyndon B. Johnson look like a saint.

Shame on you for voting for that profit over people and planet TOOL of the Fossil Fuel Fascists.

Here is some recent history that you, due to your blind pro-Trump prejudice, REFUSE to pay any attention to whatsover. It's a simple fact that you cannot handle the truth of the irrefutable damage Trump and his wrecking crew are doing to our environment, never mind our politics.

RE is correct to call you out on your consistent lack of objectivity. Yet, you refuse to acknowledge how you went out of your way to trash Obama, including many derogatory comments aimed squarely at his race.

Yeah, Obama is man I will agree was, and still is, a tool of the oligarchs. Obama's policies were the fascist war-up; Trump is the MAIN EVENT!

You Kind Sir, and your pal RE are the ones who cannot handle the truth.

Palloy has made that point abundantly clear, as has Ashvin. Both your pseudo science and lack of objectivity in all maters has been made abundantly clear. You are merely another hater with your leftist agenda, and god forbid anything or anyone get in it's way, no matter what the accuracy.

I have told you repeatedly that I did note vote for Trump and am a supporter of the Paul family. Yet you continue to pursue your hate, me hate Trump agenda. Lie about my vote as well.

So be it. Continue weeping and moaning and crying about Trump and fossil fuels destroying life on the planet as you drive away to the supermarket in your Camry Anthony, full of hate for others and love of yourself because you are so wonderful and good and planet loving.

I shall continue to laugh and smirk to myself at your absurd lies, falsehoods, and hate filled attacks against people who do not agree with you as well as your lack of knowledge and ability to deal with facts, shown for all to see, who can see, by your banning of Palloy. He does make a complete fool of you with his every objective analysis of your pseudo science postings that are in error, so at least I understand your shame. Ashvin exposed you falsehoods as well.

Remember to Antoine, it was millions upon millions of our fellow citizens that put our President in the White House, not GO. Have a pleasant Sunday afternoon Anthony, spring has arrived. GO

Your post is a blatant Ad hominem attack on my person and a groundless attack on much of the material I have posted on. I have reported it and request that the above post be deleted. Have a nice day.

Quote

Proverbs 29 New King James Version (NKJV)29:1 He who is often rebuked, and hardens his neck,Will suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.

Agelbert NOTE: The above is a repost from the Doomstead Diner. I place it here to give readers an idea of how thoroughly propagandized and intractable these Trumpers are. As you can see, the repsonse is as much abuse and vitriol as they can come up with until they finish off with some nauseating swaggering saccharin sarcasm at the end.

They cannot be reasoned with, PERIOD.

Posted by: AGelbert

The last step is to invert the legacies of these once prophets into the polar opposite of who they actually were. The rich kill first, then they own narratives. They do so through propaganda and institutional disinformation. It goes back to money and power, professors pass along lies because they don’t want to lose their jobs, politicians dare not speak against deception if they want to keep their seats and media personalities swallow their tongues or else risk getting blackballed. An implicit agreement is thus arrived at. It is better to pass along lies than to challenge accepted untruths. Those who find the courage to say “the emperor has no clothes on” and speak against the lies of the system are immediately labeled kooks and marginalized. If they speak up too loudly and garner a bit too much of a following, they might end up getting the Lumumba treatment.

There are two ways the legacies of murdered prophets are inverted. One is to lionize them as I noted above and turn them into mythical legends.

Posted by: AGelbert

Original caption: "Memphis, Tennessee. An unidentified woman has difficulty holding back her tears as she watches the casket of slain civil-rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., put aboard a plane for transport to his home in Atlanta, Georgia." Bettmann / Getty

One of the last pictures to be taken of Martin Luther King Jr., as he spoke to a mass rally in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3, 1968, saying he would not halt his plans for a massive demonstration scheduled for April 8 in spite of a federal injunction. Bettmann / Getty

People stand near a destroyed and burned-out building on 14th Street and Kenyon Street in northwest Washington on April 6, 1968. Darrell C. Crain / D.C. Public Library Specials Collections / AP

More than 2,000 paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division were flown into Washington, D.C., on April 6, 1968, to augment the federal and national guard units already on duty in riot-torn sections of the city. # Bettmann / Getty

Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., walks on the arm of Dr. Ralph Abernathy, her husband's successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership conference, leading about 10,000 people in a memorial march in King's honor. The King children—Yolanda, Martin III, and Dexter—are at left with Harry Belafonte. Reverend Andrew Young marches next to Dr. Abernathy. Bettmann / Getty

Rows of Pennsylvania national guardsmen march down the street and sidewalks clearing the area in Pittsburgh's Hill District on April 8, 1968. Residents lean from windows watching the show of force. The guardsmen were called out to restore order following three days of arson and looting in the district. AP

Firemen gather around a fire engine near the intersection of 14th and Irving Streets in Washington, D.C., on April 6, 1968, following rioting after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. # Darrell C. Crain / D.C. Public Library Specials Collections / AP

A soldier and civilians walk near a destroyed newsstand at 14th and Kenyon Streets in northwest Washington, D.C., on April 6, 1968, following rioting after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. # Darrell C. Crain / D.C. Public Library Specials Collections / AP

President Johnson called federal troops into the nation's capital to restore peace after a day of arson, looting, and violence on April 5, 1968. Here, a trooper stands guard in the street as another (left) patrols a completely demolished building. # Bettmann / Getty

When it comes time for Trump to call in Federal Troops to restore order he will probably authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Hyperbole. President Trump is an American citizen with a family and desires like the rest of us.

Hate or dislike him all you wish, he certainly is a controversial person but he is one of us, a fellow citizen elected our president by fellow citizens who rejected the status quo of career politicians and their never ending lies bull s h i t and lining of their own pockets.

You never said such nice things about Obama-sama.

RE

Isn't is about time you grew up to gang leader??

Right after you drop the Trumpovetsky propaganda.

RE

Golden Oxen,Your "history in photographs" is, to put it as charitably as I can, rather selective. If you had been objective, you would have shown pictures of Hoover smirking about MLK Jr.'s death. FBI Hoover had him assasinated. THAT is the correct perspective to the history you portray.

No, I do not expect you to respond respectfully. But I wish that, rather than hurl some sarcasm at me or lash out in your typical ad hominem fashion, you would accept this post as constructive criticism.

It really bothers me that you shot yourself in the foot, and probably your family's heart, by voting for an unrepentant enemy of the environment.

We all require a viable biosphere to survive in this valley of tears. I just do not get it, GO. You are smarter than that. Can you hate so much that you are willing to see everyhing you hold dear in this biosphere be increasingly insulted just so Trump remains in power? That does not make any sense at all.

Your Trump🦍 hero (By the way,how does it feel to see Trump🐵depicted the SAME WAY 🦍 you often depicted Obama? My depiction is ACCURATE, unlike yours, because it applies to his polices, not his race.) makes Lyndon B. Johnson look like a saint.

Shame on you for voting for that profit over people and planet TOOL of the Fossil Fuel Fascists.

Here is some recent history that you, due to your blind pro-Trump prejudice, REFUSE to pay any attention to whatsover. It's a simple fact that you cannot handle the truth of the irrefutable damage Trump and his wrecking crew are doing to our environment, never mind our politics.

RE is correct to call you out on your consistent lack of objectivity. Yet, you refuse to acknowledge how you went out of your way to trash Obama, including many derogatory comments aimed squarely at his race.

Yeah, Obama is man I will agree was, and still is, a tool of the oligarchs. Obama's policies were the fascist war-up; Trump is the MAIN EVENT!

As far as policies that endanger the health and welfare of you and yours, Obama was a piker compared to Trump (see the evidence below).

Posted by: AGelbert

Over the past several months, news about the white nationalist/alt-right, no longer seems to draw the attention of the mainstream media. Nevertheless, as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Keegan Hankes and Alex Amend pointed out in its recent report titled "The Alt-Right Is Killing People" there have been over 100 people killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called alt-right.

"[T]here have been at least 13 alt-right related fatal episodes, leaving 43 dead and more than 60 injured," the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported. "Nine of the 12 incidents counted here occurred in 2017 alone, making last year the most violent year for the movement."

Posted by: AGelbert

Clashes Erupt as White Supremacist Richard Spencer Speaks at Michigan State University

The white supremacist Richard Spencer spoke at Michigan State University after defeating a campaign against his appearance. The Rev. David Alexander Bullock 🕊 of Change Agent Consortium​ says that Spencer shouldn't be given a platform to recruit for a violent, racist movement

Posted by: AGelbert

Gun ownership in the United States, largely criminalized for poor people of color, is a potent tool of oppression. It does not protect us from tyranny. It is an instrument of tyranny.

By Chris Hedges

SNIPPET 1:

American violence 🦀 has always been primarilyvigilante 🐉🦕🦖 violence. It is a product of the colonial militias; the U.S. Army, which carried out campaigns of genocide against Native Americans; slave patrols; hired mercenaries and gunslingers; the Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts detective agencies; gangs of strikebreakers; the Iron and Coal Police; company militias; the American Legion veterans of World War I who attacked union agitators; the White Citizens’ Council; the White League, the Knights of the White Camellia; and the Ku Klux Klan, which controlled some states. These vigilante groups carried out atrocities, mostly against people of color and radicals, within our borders that later characterized our savage subjugation of the Philippines, interventions in Latin America, the wars in Korea and Vietnam and our current debacles in the Middle East. Gen. Jacob H. Smith summed up American attitudes about wholesale violence in the Philippines when he ordered his troops to turn the island of Samar, defended by Filipino insurgents, into “a howling wilderness.”

Mass culture and most historians do not acknowledge the patterns of violence that have played out over and over since the founding of the nation. This historical amnesia blinds us to the endemic violence that defines our culture and is encoded in our national myth. As historian Richard Slotkin writes in “Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860,” the first of his three magisterial works on violence in American society, our Jacksonian form of democracy was defined by “the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat banker; [in a time] when racist irrationalism and a falsely conceived economics prolonged and intensified slavery in the teeth of American democratic idealism; and when men like Davy Crockett became national heroes by defining national aspirations in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust.”

SNIPPET 2:

The Second Amendment, as Dunbar-Ortiz 🕊 makes clear in her book, was never about protecting individual freedom. It was about codifying white vigilante violence into law .

“The elephant in the room in these debates has long been what the armed militias of the Second Amendment were to be used for,” Dunbar-Ortiz writes. “The kind of militias and gun rights of the Second Amendment had long existed in the colonies and were expected to continue fulfilling two primary roles in the United States: destroying Native communities in the armed march to possess the continent, and brutally subjugating the enslaved African population. …”

The cliché for television news is true: "If it bleeds, it leads." That phrase says a lot about our nation's grim fascination with carnage.

Perhaps it is understandable when you consider the premise of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. As she establishes in an interview with Truthout, the Second Amendment represents a United States 🐉🦕🦖🦀 built on stolen land and chattel slavery.The means of enforcing these goals, in relation to Indigenous people, were largely through the use of militias armed with guns and the government military:

I would call "massacres and oppression of Indigenous Americans" a government policy of genocide, total war, total ethnic cleansing. The citizens' militias [were] one aspect of that policy; the other was the formal US Army and Marine Corps, which spent the first century of US independence carrying out this project. The role of settler-colonial landowners as voluntary militias in initiating massacres to drive Native communities out and seize their land was acted out as "individual rights ".

As for Black chattel slavery, Dunbar-Ortiz asserts:

By the mid-1700s, the plantation agricultural system was agribusiness and made up the primary source of wealth in the new republic. There was no debate about including the individual right to bear arms and form militias in inscribing the Second Amendment among the first 10 amendments to the constitution, as these features already existed in the colonies. Colonial citizens' militias already existed, and by time of independence, the slave-owning colonial militias had been transformed into slave patrols.

In short, many of those who worship guns do so as a legacy of how firearms were used to enact violence on two oppressed groups essential to the growth of the United States. Guns were and are a representation of a nation built upon the violence of white supremacy, as land was bloodily seized from Indigenous people, and as enslaved people were kept in bondage by militias with guns.